Whether you have a booming fast-food restaurant or a humble little café; a company sprawled across different locations or a small business made of one store – you need to pave your path to success, with the help of devices placed at your disposal. These devices can be clunky hardware like PCs, barcode scanners and card readers that occupy too much space and give little functionality.

What if you could complete almost all of your business functions with just one easy-to-use software?

The prospect is no longer a dream because the business world of today is finally becoming accustomed to the modern point-of-sale (POS) – a single system capable to carry your entire business forwards.

Now, features like tracking sales, sending invoices or taking customer feedback are kind of generic – but there’s a lot more than what meets the eye:

Control Inventory the smart way

Believe it or not, most business owners aren’t exactly finance experts. Most of them don’t even have the best grades at mathematics – in fact, you can bet they may even dislike it!

So what do they do? They let their POS handle the math for them.

Advanced POS systems help manage and compute inventory in real-time, by tracking stock levels. Even in between sales, you can be sure that your inventory count is being updated – literally by the second.

Having such a system helps you stay on top of your inventory without having to spend hours hunched over a desk with a calculator in one hand and your head in the other. Once all the hard parts are removed from the work, inventory tracking becomes a lot more profitable, and less arduous a task.

Some POS Systems let you take fuller control over your inventory – and yes, I mean it. Oscar does so by offering a mobile app designed for inventory management so that you can add or edit product photos, descriptions and even their prices on-the-go. Scanning barcodes now do not need clunky hardware, because POS systems have that feature built within; now you can update your inventory within moments.

Menu Engineering

Now here is something that will surely attract the restauranteur’s attention – because now, you can engineer your own menu without a sweat.

You may ask, “Why is building a menu so important?” The best answer I can give to that is through a scenario:

Imagine you seating your guests at their tables. You don’t recognize their faces, and that’s a good thing – now you know they are new to your business. There’s nothing you want more than to have them fixated at your restaurant as loyal customers. Eager to maintain your reputation of supreme hospitality, you hand everyone their menus and await their choices.

Now, a guest looking at your menu is bound to buy – so why not fashion the entire menu so that they get to automatically pick the most profitable menu items?

This is where a POS system is able to handle the basics of menu engineering: you can use simple tactics to draw attention to more successful items, and detract focus from the less popular items – or even remove them entirely if the situation became that dire.

A stellar POS can quantify the popularity of an item beyond its monetary value, with the help of sales reporting feature. You can know more about how much each dish is contributing to the bottom line, and hence make purposeful decisions when designing a menu. You can even bite the bullet, and try out the latest trends in the market using analytics, and test new menu designs.

I know I’ve yet to answer the impending question: “So what?”

To that, I can say that such a POS system can help you let your business grow with the help of tactics decided using data. And one thing is obvious – you cannot argue with data.

Offer special Deals and Discounts

This is yet another factor suited for a restaurant owner who has yet to adopt the modern ways of the tablet-based POS system.

In order to be competitive in today’s market, business owners have to maximise their traffic and sales by utilizing all the tools and techniques they can think of. One fool-proof way to do just that is by leveraging dynamic pricing in the form of discounts, special offers and promotions.

Now, a good POS system will support and provide special offers and promotions, because it is a great way to stir up sales – and POS systems like Oscar are designed to fulfil your need.

Again, the impending question rises: “So what?”

The answer does not lie in its implication, but rather in its application – the task of giving your customers discounts, and incorporating it into their transaction is no longer hard. You don’t have to sit there with your calculator and calculate the order total yourself, worrying whether you did it right or not, because POS is right there by your side. You can trust its calculations and simultaneously give your customers the best, quick experience at a reasonable price.

To be able to please both yourself and the customer – well, it is a work of wonder.

Manage employees

One thing which is interesting to know is that the POS is not made just for the employer – it is also made for the employee.

You guessed it right – now you can manage your employees as well. A POS software can track their time and attendance, making sure they worked as per they promised. Furthermore, you can even track paid and unpaid breaks to make sure all their hours are accurately tracked.

But perhaps the best feature a good tablet POS system can offer is an employee account. This enables you to give your workers different levels of access to the POS and Dashboard, to increase work efficiency. While you’re at it, you can even limit access to more sensitive features like sales reports, ability to issue refunds or voids, and a lot more – now you know your business will not consist of any accounting mistake.

Running a business isn’t a walk in the park. It takes dedication, patience, and persistence. The right POS system can help you make the job a lot easier by providing you with unique functions, capable of turning your business around for the better.